Volleyball Team Comes Out Of Left Field

October 21, 2002|Kevin Thomas Los Angeles Times

The most improbable aspect of The Iron Ladies is that it is based on a true story: Thailand actually has a volleyball team composed mostly of gays, transvestites and transsexuals, and it enters national competitions.

This extremely broad comedy makes The Full Monty seem understated in comparison, but it has been a sure-fire crowd pleaser on home ground and has won audience awards at lesbian and gay film festivals.

Director Yongyoot Thongkongtoon's tale begins in 1996, when Coach Bee (Siridhana Hongsophon), is selected to put together a winning male team. She announces that tryouts will be open to all. This is great news for Mon (Sahaparp Virakamin), a somewhat effeminate young man with long hair, and his friend Jung (Chaichan Nimpoonsawas), a flamboyant, foulmouthed and fearless transvestite, who have heretofore been discriminated against in tryouts.

Their macho teammates find their presence so threatening that, except for the captain, Chai (Jessdaporn Pholdee), they quit the team. What's Coach Bee to do but ask Jung and Mon to recruit replacements among their friends?

When the team hits the court, the crowd reacts in an uproar, but soon applauds its guts and skill in deflecting taunts and scoring points. There are locker-room dramas amid the campy shenanigans, and all that high-energy silliness and sentimentality becomes wearying at times. But The Iron Ladies is also funny and good-natured, and that ends up counting more.

Grisly, imaginative

Chang Youn-Hyun's Tell Me Something, a sleek police procedural of considerable ingenuity and even more grisliness, set box-office records in South Korea. It touches upon the vulnerability of girls to unspeakable horrors while growing up in their own homes, a persistent and potent theme in Asian cinema that has nearly universal resonance.

For all its style and assurance, Tell Me Something is not ultimately original enough to sustain its many horrific images, however brief they may be. Chang does let audiences know what they're in for right at the top, with a shadowy figure slicing off a man's arms. He is the first of four men who meet this fate, their body parts becoming pieces of a demented puzzle that Han Suk-Gyu's Detective Cho strives to solve. Cho places himself at great peril when he's drawn to an enigmatic beauty (Shim Eun-Ha) who knew all the victims.

Tell Me Something has ultimately such a small pool of suspects that it depends for its impact not upon the revelation of the killer's identity but rather on the imaginative and intricate way the mystery plays out, all stunningly imbued with gritty neo-noir atmosphere by cinematographer Kim Sung-Bok.